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“Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.”
–Hosea 6:3

Dear Friends & Family —

We want to thank you, and to acknowledge the blessing that God has given us through you, in the amazing transformation of the house on Memphis Ave. There are still some tasks to be done, both in making repairs and in seeing the purchase through its final stages — we are still very much in Hudson Taylor’s “difficult” stage — but God willing, with your prayers & help, we are believing that everything will work together for good, and will be a witness of grace to all who see it.

~ Andrew & Nicole

“I have found that there are three stages in every great work of God: first it is impossible; then it is
difficult; then it is done.”

~ Hudson Taylor

Each world penetrates the other. The present is, so to speak, pregnant with the future to which the future gives birth. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” declares the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charged as in electrically charged; the present is given new urgency, raised to a new level of intensity, because it is riddled through and through with a promised future.

~ Richard John Neuhaus, Living Between the Now & the Not Yet

Dear Friends & Family,

The looking part of our housing journey is over. After a long, intense search, we finally have made an offer on a house that has been accepted. We have found a ranch home with over 1600 square feet on Madison’s east side, near Fair Oaks & Milwaukee. Well, technically, it is in one of the many patches (surrounded by Madison) that make up the Town of Blooming Grove. The neighborhood is somewhat walkable, with friends, several parks, the bike path & the Goodman Community Center nearby; the library is just five blocks away!

We are excited about the house, but it is being sold as a result of a pretty messy divorce, where the owners trashed & abandoned their things. It is hard to see, in the midst of it’s current trouble, the good place we believe God has for us on Memphis Ave., but we believe that God has set us there — which means that we get to clean the mess!

This is both important & urgent because our ability to finance the purchase depends on the house being able to pass inspection. The bank inspectors will very soon — within a week or so — be looking for a place with no peeling paint, no debris or hazards, etc. That’s not where this place is yet, but we have undertaken to redeem it, to make the promise of blessing a reality.

This is where we need your help. There is no way we can do this alone. We need scrapers & painters, baggers & haulers, scrubbers & fixers to work with us to clear away the junk and fix the broken places, so that this can meet the required standards to become our home.

The pictures below will give you an idea of what we are facing (though we’ve already done some work since I took them). We have a trailer we can borrow to haul away debris to the dump, but still need to find a pickup truck with a hitch to pull the trailer when we are ready to load up. Things are moving fast, & our plans for how this will get done are changing as we work through the task.

One of our friends, responding on Facebook to the above quotation from Hudson Taylor, said, “Funny how impossible is almost easier to deal with than difficult. Yet that difficult stage is where the most gets done and we see the transformation from impossible to completed.” We are asking you to pray & work with us to bring this transformation to completion.

Please leave a comment below, contact us on Facebook, by phone, or email, and let us know when you can come help. We’ll plan a big celebration with all our helpers when we’re moved in!

Grace & Peace,

Andrew & Nicole

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